There is probably room for one or five lifestyle businesses but convincing venture capital to drop the megabux to go big would be a feat and eventually land at some sub-optimal state anyway.
Finding some hack to democratize&decentralize the indexing and expensive processes like JavaScript interpretation, image interpretation, OCR, etc is an open angle and even an avenue for "Web3" to offload the cost. But you will ultimately want the core search and index on a tighter knit cluster (many computers physically close to one another for speed of light reasons, although you can have N of these clusters) for performance so it's a hard nut to crack for making something equitable for both the developers and any prospectors and safe from various takeovers and enshitifies. Let us know if you know a way.
I would want to use a search engine that does not perform JavaScript interpretation, image interpretation, OCR, etc. (This is not the same as excluding web pages with JavaScripts from the search results. They would still be included but only indexed by whatever text is available without JavaScripts; if there isn't any such text, then they should be excluded. This would also apply if it is only pictures, video, etc and no text, then they also cannot be indexed, whether or not they have JavaScripts.)
Luckily none of these things are mutually exclusive.
Thanks to all the SPA idiocy you will miss enough content to matter if you have zero JS interpretation, so you would want to let the user choose which indexes they want for a query because sometimes you need these other resource types to answer the query.
Finding some hack to democratize&decentralize the indexing and expensive processes like JavaScript interpretation, image interpretation, OCR, etc is an open angle and even an avenue for "Web3" to offload the cost. But you will ultimately want the core search and index on a tighter knit cluster (many computers physically close to one another for speed of light reasons, although you can have N of these clusters) for performance so it's a hard nut to crack for making something equitable for both the developers and any prospectors and safe from various takeovers and enshitifies. Let us know if you know a way.